Shanghai to Zaragoza: How many riverside avenues do you have?

We’re sure everyone has forgotten due to a lack of media coverage, however, Shanghai will be hosting the 2010 World Expo. In order to prepare for Shanghai’s debut on the world stage, several construction projects are underway. After all, Shanghai has to upstage former World Expo hosts, such as Knoxville in the US, Hanover in Germany, Aichi Prefecture in Japan, and the main rival, the 2008 host Zaragoza, Spain.The newest construction project, announced Wednesday in the Shanghai Morning Post, is a riverside avenue in Pudong. We already thought there was a riverside avenue in Pudong and we were right. This will be the second riverside avenue in Pudong. We guess you can never have enough riverside avenues!It will be located on a 690,000 square meter plot of land. The area used to be a shipyard, but was dismantled in 2004. They plan to be finished with at least part of the construction by 2009. The second riverside avenue will include 80,000 square meters of shops, restaurants and parks. The rest will be made up of luxury apartments, landmark office buildings and hotels (oooh yeah we certainly need more of those in Shanghai, don’t we?). Luckily, the designers have decided to keep some of the historic feel to the design and will allow several shipyard remnants to remain. There are even talks to build a ship museum.We at Shanghaiist hope that the construction goes smoothly, not only because Pudong desperately needs more luxury apartments and skyscrapers, but also so we can show those Zaragozians how much better we really are!Photo from shme.com